Microsoft Hell

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Haven’t been inspired to blog much. I’ve been too busy with work and my new life.

I’ve been translating a lot, on my new MacBook, which has worked flawlessly so far. The only problems I’ve run into are Windows bugs, « features », and general bad ergonomics, hallucinatingly complex workflows to achieve the simplest tasks, etc. Besides that, there’s not much more to tell, which is a good sign!

I’ve also been contracted to design a logo and to do the graphic design (!!!) of a web site (some medical billing company).

I foolishly decided to use the Cascading Style Sheet W3C standard to do the web page layout. In a nutshell, this allows you to separate the content of a page from the layout instructions that tell your web browser how to display that content in the browser window. This makes it infinitely easier to edit content, much harder to break the layout when editing content, and also allows you to control the layout and appearance of every page of a site from a single, external CSS file that contains all of the layout and appearance instructions.

Again, it worked flawlessly.

Until I opened the pages in Internet Explorer for Windows.

The site was completely broken. I then spent 2 full days scouring the Web trying to figure out what was going on. It quickly became clear that IE Win simply does not honor CSS positioning (and doesn’t intend to in its new version 7). It has its own « standard, » which is less versatile, and doesn’t work with any other browser. So as usual with Microsoft, you are forced to use their « standard » (and shut everyone else out) or to cripple your site by removing standard CSS features that every other browser could easily display (in effect, torpedoing the « competing » standard).

I was genearally aware of this situation, and I know that the WordPress-based sknoblog doesn’t work properly on IE Win (the left sidebar floats to the bottom of the page instead of the top, so IE Win users have probably never seen it!) but I figured my enligntened readership either use the vastly superior FireFox browser, or Apple’s Safari if they use Macs. So I really hadn’t bothered to investigate or fix the problem and didn’t realize how bad things really are.

Indeed, what I then discovered, to my utter amazement and dismay, is that every major site on the Internet that uses CSS for page layout (and most of them do), includes incredibly convoluted workarounds to make the pages display more or less properly in IE, often relying on undocumented « hacks ». These workarounds and hacks however, are extremely limited in what they can achieve, and require doubling or tripling the HTML / CSS code, adding tons of JavaScript, which pretty much defeats the whole purpose of using CSS in the first place (simpler, easier to manage, more efficient code).

I’ll spare you a couple of paragraphs on the fact that IE Win doesn’t display transparent .PNG graphics.

I did end up getting my site to layout properly in IE Win, and yes, this required adding many IE-specific instructions in my CSS file. Unfortunately, one nifty, CSS-dependant feature included in my design proposal (a static navigation menu that always stays in the same spot on the Web page, even when you scroll the contents), can’t work in IE as advertised. And of course, my client loved that feature, and is really bummed that it doesn’t work in IE. It’s just one line of CSS (« position: fixed; »). I found javascripts, some of them containing hundreds of lines of code, that try to achieve the same effect in IE, but that have various limitations, flaws, or bugs, and require customization beyond my technical abilities.

Throughout this ordeal, I went through the classic 5 stages (denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance), punctuated by continual cursing at Microsoft, and at all the unsuspecting Windows users who make Microsoft rich and powerful despite its piss-poor, flawed, hilariously complex, dangerous products combined with its agressive monopolistic tactics, etc. (And yes, I do realize I’ve probably just insulted 90% of my readership).

Pamela, a poor, unsuspecting Windows user, who had to bear my grief and anger and ranting, was quite shocked to discover how much simpler and more efficient workflows are on Mac OS X and how much better non-MS browsers behave, and is geeky enough to appreciate the scandalous nature of the status quo…

Interestingly, my client liked and accepted unconditonally one of my logo designs, and my proposed Web site design. But the whole process is now stalled because of this one, major marketing mistake on my part: I shouldn’t have included my spiffy navigation feature that doesn’t work in IE which my client now wants so badly.

I should have crippled my design instead.

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